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He's No Dummy

He's graduated from high school sitcoms to the Hollywood A-list and a role as a 3-D supervillain in 'Despicable Me,' but the resolutely down-to-earth Jason Segel remains both freak and geek. He talks to Alex Pappademas about nude scenes, marriage, and Muppets. (Mostly Muppets, actually)

One night not long ago, Jason Segel walked out of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and saw a kid on the sidewalk, maybe 17, struggling to light what appeared to be a half-smoked cigarette. Segel, a smoker himself and a friend to fiends in need—"There's not too many of us left," he points out—proffered a fresh one from his own pack. The kid looked up, face full of withering 17-year-old pity, and said, "This is a joint, sir."

The sir—that was the worst part, Segel says, laughing about it a few weeks later while seated outside the same restaurant. You can build a career playing, and writing about, guys blithely enjoying protracted young-dudehoods, clinging to their puppets (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), their "jerk-off station"-equipped man-caves (I Love You, Man), or their bongs (Knocked Up), but eventually you turn 30, teenage potheads look at you like you're as old as Jay Leno, and your carefully calibrated real-life perma-dudehood falls victim to the working week.

"I miss smoking a ton of pot," Segel says, genuinely wistful. "I can't do it anymore. I've got too much work." There's his role as TV's most realistic contentedly hitched goofball on How I Met Your Mother, which is a five-days-a-week gig. The Gulliver's Travels movie he's finishing up with Jack Black. The romantic comedy he just wrapped with Cameron Diaz and the one he's doing with the brothers Duplass, of mumblecore microfame. And the script he's fine-tuning for a new and, he hopes, franchise-rebooting Muppet movie.

When this interview is over, he's got to go brainstorm a list of celebrities to tap for cameos in that last project—but he plans to do that at a bar, perhaps before or after taking a nap. Not everything has changed: We meet up at Meltdown Comics—Despicable Me, the 3-D CGI movie Segel is promoting, is sort of an evil version of The Incredibles, with Segel and Steve Carell voicing rival supervillains—but Segel presented at the Writers Guild Awards last night, and when he arrives, comedy-business-cazh in a roomy plaid western shirt and jeans, he's hurting from a long night of after-afterpartying, so we repair to the place across the street to talk in a more hangover-friendly context. Egg sandwiches on focaccia and a bottle of what turns out to be nerve-toxin-grade hot sauce are procured; Segel lights up his first smoke and starts coming back to life.

1. MUPPETS ARE NEVER SAD

So—who's the most famous person who goes to the WGA awards?

You know who was there last night, was Morgan Freeman. Full of gravitas, as usual. All the presenters were sort of making fun of how lame the Writers Guild Awards are, and then Morgan Freeman got up there, like [solemn Morgan Freeman voice] "Once…in a lifetime…a man writes a script…" And everyone, all of a sudden, became so serious. [laughs]

How's the Muppet movie coming along? Nothing against any of your other projects, but this is the one I'm most excited about.

It's my dream come true, man.

How did you end up pitching yourself to relaunch the Muppets?

It was right after Sarah Marshall, and I had a little bit of juice all of a sudden. Writing juice. And I took this meeting at Disney, and they're pitching me different stuff to rewrite, and I stopped, and I said, "Thank you, this is all very flattering"—which it was, it's supercool to suddenly be in that position—"but listen. You guys own the Muppets, and you're just kind of sitting on 'em. I really love the Muppets, and I think I know how to bring the franchise back." And there was literally laughter in the room. Like, "Oh—R-rated Segel is making a weird joke." And I said, "No, I'm serious. And I'm not gonna make it the Judd Apatow version of the Muppets. It's not gonna be ironic."

So you pitch that, and then they laugh.…

They laughed, and then I got a call on the way home from my agent, going, "They bought it, if you're serious." What happened was, Henson Company created the puppets for Sarah Marshall. And I was there, and I said, "Hey, while I'm here, can I maybe see a Kermit and a Miss Piggy?" And they got this kinda sad look, and they said, "Um, we don't have Kermits or Piggys. We sold everything to Disney." [incredibly serious now] And it all sorta made sense, why the Muppets have disappeared. That's something that really has to come from an individual person's passion. There's CGI now, and there's all these things that are theoretically cooler, but you'll never be able to replace the actual, tactile thing. Like when Kermit scrunches his face? You can't repeat that with CGI. I think when you can sit and make it perfect to the degree you want, you lose some of the humanity of it.

Who's your favorite Muppet?

It's between Kermit and Fozzie. I cannot get over Fozzie's bad jokes and the confidence that he delivers them with. Fozzie Bear has so many bear puns in this script—like, "Traffic is grizzly!" "This is unbearable!" It's the greatest. But when you get to one of those really earnest Kermit speeches? That is fucking awesome. [perfect Kermit voice] "Guys, this is about friendship, not about money! If we're not together, then, heck, I don't want to be here at all." Kermit was the original Everyman to me. The original Tom Hanks, the original Jimmy Stewart.

Muppets Take Manhattan fucking destroyed me when I was a kid. The part where the Muppets break up is really emotionally affecting.

Yeah. When Kermit sends them off, and they sing "Saying Goodbye"? I had to cite that a lot in these pitch meetings, because I kept getting notes from, like, the Muppet brass, saying, "Muppets are never sad. Muppets never break up." And I had to be like, "No—they do. And that's the best part." That's sort of where they got away from the beauty of the Muppets. They became all happy-go-lucky. Even the opening of The Muppet Movie. "Rainbow Connection"—that's not a happy-go-lucky song. He's alone in a swamp, hoping for something more.

2. THIS GUY'S WEIRD DICK

You're doing a little of that CGI thing in Despicable Me. This must be the easiest work you can do, in some ways.

It's like two hours on a Saturday once every six months. I haven't seen it yet. Everyone else saw it last week and really, really loved it, so I'm excited, but I'm always really nervous to see stuff that I do. Sarah Marshall was the first movie I had a really hands-on role in, so I had to be there for all the cuts, making choices about which jokes to use and all that. It's hard to watch yourself. It's a tricky thing. Especially if you're watching yourself naked.

When you're trying to figure out how much of your nudity belongs in the final cut?

Literally, like, frame by frame. You have no idea. We would test twenty frames versus ten frames [of the nude scene]—and this is, like, half a second of film we're talking about. The craziest thing was the first test screening. This is the first thing I've ever written; it's my first leading role. I was nervous, y'know? And I'm sitting in the back with a baseball cap on so no one knows I'm there, and it's going great—people really seem to like it, and I'm thrilled. It's the happiest night of my life. And then the moderator goes, "Okay, well, this has been great. Does anyone else have anything to say before we go?" And this one 21-year-old college dude raises his hand and says, "Yeah. Before we go, can we just take a minute and talk about this guy's weird dick?" [laughs]

Did he have specific criticisms of it?

No. But he had to put weird in the sentence! I mean, it's pretty regular!

Did they let him finish his thought?

No, they didn't let him continue to pontificate. The moderator was like, "No, I don't think we need to talk about that." I would have liked to hear it, actually. The pros and cons.

3. THOSE FIVE "OH, FUCK" YEARS

A chop-top white van with tourists on board pulls up at the light. It's the Haunted Hollywood Tour. Two college-age girls in big sunglasses lean out the side of the van yelling, "Jason, we love you!" Segel says, "Thank you." One of the girls says, "You actually met my friend Nicolette in a bar in New York once!" Segel, amused, says, "Oh, really?" The girl says, "Yeah. You came back to the bar with a six-pack, and the bouncer wouldn't let you in!" Segel laughs and says, "Oh, I remember that." The light changes; the van pulls away.

What's it like to have buses full of tourists yelling at you?

I think it's hilarious. And I think our group, the Judd Apatow circle—our "thing" is that we're normal dudes. All our movies are just us kind of sitting around smoking pot and just hanging out, and people tend to treat us like that, like [hey-brah dude voice] "Oh, shit, what's up? Can I buy you a shot?" And we are those dudes. When we started out—when I got Freaks and Geeks, I was like 18, Seth was 16. Judd wasn't who Judd is now. And we would sit around and just wax poetic about how we'd take over Hollywood someday. And then it happened, that's the weird part of it—but I think in our minds, we're still those dudes, sitting around like, "We're gonna show 'em all!"

It sounds like Judd always pushed all you guys to do your own stuff on the side.

Judd's big thing was just, work, work, work, work, work. In your off time, write. In your off time, make a short film. He took Seth and me aside after Freaks and Geeks and said, "If you guys can improv like this, you can write." He mentored us. Two weekends, sitting in his house, in his office, showing us how to do an outline, how to write a beat sheet, how to write a script. Literally—how to use Final Draft. Like, "Push tab to jump to the next thing." That degree of mentoring.

Why do you think he bothered to do that?

I didn't go to college, to do Freaks and Geeks. Seth left high school. We were kids. And when that show got canceled, I think Judd thought, like, "Oh shit—I've taken these kids and totally redirected the course of their lives, and now it's over. I'd better make good on this." And he did.

He felt it was his job to keep you from ending up homeless.

Dude, can you imagine? Just me and a puppet: "Got a dollar?"

You did have a hard time getting anything going post-Judd, though. Rogen had the same problem.

There were some super-lean years, yeah. I'm six feet four. And I entered into this period all of a sudden when I was too big to play a kid and I was too young to play an adult. Like, I couldn't play the lawyer, but I couldn't play the high school kid anymore. I was fuckin' terrified. Like, Oh God—am I gonna go home and live with my parents, or what? But that's when I started writing. I sold my first script when I was 21—this kids' adventure movie that never got made. I just bought that one back, actually. I'm pretty psyched about it.

How much did it cost you to buy it back? Was it a bargain?

Same price I sold it for. [laughs] Yeah. Amazing. It did not appreciate in value, for some reason.

Were you working at all during those years?

No. I'd made enough money from Freaks and Geeks to, like, pay my rent. And then I sold that script, and that sort of kept me afloat for a while, too. And then I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. But it got pretty dark for a while. Around like [age] 24 was the moment of Okay, am I kidding myself? Should I quit? There's only so long that you can go I'm meant to do this but not be getting jobs, before reality kicks in.

Eventually you can't convince yourself that it's their fault.

Right. At some point you have to maybe look at yourself. And then How I Met Your Mother came along. And it was a real godsend. It came just when I needed it. And I felt good about myself again, and I was acting and working. And that's when I wrote Sarah Marshall, during the first year on How I Met Your Mother.

4. THE TALKING-HORSE MOVIE IS SUDDENLY A HOT COMMODITY

How I Met Your Mother isn't exactly Two and a Half Men, but it's a pretty traditional sitcom. No disrespect to Charlie Sheen—

I know what you mean. One of the notes Judd always gives on scripts is "Too sitcom-y." But initially I was just happy to be out of my cave of depression. I'd been writing really, really bizarre scripts. Weird kids' movies about talking horses. I was slowly descending into madness.

Cry-for-help kind of stuff.

Yeah. Someone read this and get me out of here! And what's ironic is that now I can sell that script for a gazillion dollars. The talking-horse movie is suddenly a hot commodity. [laughs]

Was this when you started writing your Dracula musical?

Yes. I wrote two or three songs, and I played them for people, and they literally told me I was crazy and not to play them for anyone else. And now look. The hard thing about a romantic comedy is that you know how the movie is going to end. The guy's going to end up with the girl it seems like he's going to end up with. So [during Sarah Marshall] Judd is going, "We gotta think of a unique ending." And I was like, "Remember the Dracula musical? What if we make it that the guy's really into puppeteering, and we end it with a superlavish puppet musical?" And Judd looked at me, and he went, [eye-rolling Judd Apatow voice] "Well, y'know—it's your movie."

He recognized that this was you just transparently trying to shoehorn your puppet fixation into a movie.

Yeah. Totally. It's weird, but it's sweet, and it did position the character in a good way. The whole Dracula thing, especially in the context of that movie, is that the guy really does have a dream. And it's something he's really good at. What you do informs who you are. It's an important thing. So many [romantic comedies] are so half-baked. They don't take the time to think, "What does this person actually do? What is her job? Where does she live? How is she wearing such nice clothes all the time?"

That's one of the things I've always liked about How I Met Your Mother—it uses those details, about where the characters work and what they do, to inform character and drive stories.

One of the things I like about it, as trivial as it sounds, is that they hang out in a bar. Yes. Yes.

The Friends were always in a coffee shop.

Yeah. Come on. I was so happy, just for the simple fact that they acknowledged that people go to bars at night. They don't go to a coffee shop.

How many more years do you have on How I Met Your Mother?

Three more years.

Do you think it's going to go longer than that?

[carefully] It's an amazing place to be. But when you become an actor, part of it, the secret part of it, is that you don't want to work a regular nine-to-five job. And the secret part of a TV show is that it's a nine-to-five job. And eight years is longer than any relationship I've ever been in, it's longer than any school I went to. I think after eight years, I'll feel like I honorably did my commitment. It's funny—it's the greatest problem in the world to have. Jeez—I'm the luckiest guy in the world. But when your idol is Peter Sellers, playing one character for eight years isn't what you're trying to do. I don't really feel like I have that much more to offer with this character. Maybe if we got divorced or something—but that's not gonna happen. It's gonna be some iteration of, like, my TV wife opens the fridge, and she's like, "What happened to the birthday cake?" And I walk in with a little frosting here [points to corner of mouth] like, "What birthday cake?"

You want to know my theory? We're going to find out at some point that the mother's dead. And adult Ted has been telling them all these stories about the mother they never knew. It'll retroactively cast the entire show in this dark-comic light.

[without missing a beat] I suggested that also.

Really?

Yeah.

How was that received?

Scoffing. They don't care about what I say. [laughs] I had two other suggestions, too. One is that they're dead. The two kids and their father—they're dead, and they're in purgatory, and he's telling the story for eternity.

It's the worst punishment ever! They have to spend eternity listening to their dad's boring stories.

And then my other suggestion, which they never used, which I think would be so funny, is—it's the future, right? I think in one of those scenes, they should open the window, and it should be, like, a postapocalyptic wasteland outside. It should be like I Am Legend. Horrible mutants.

Well, it's gettin' dark—time to close the vampire screens. You're saying you'd come back for that.

If it became an hour-long drama, like Lost? Totally.

5. HAUNTED HOLLYWOOD

Segel's living situation is discussed. His house is in the hills right above the Chateau Marmont. He lets them park cars in his driveway; in return, he gets twenty-four-hour Chateau room service delivered to his home.

How do you end up living in the heart of Hollywood like that?

It was the specific house, not the area. I'd been in the same one-bedroom apartment for twelve years—same apartment I lived in during Freaks and Geeks, same place since I was 17—long beyond when I could have afforded a better place, because I was still so scared it was all gonna end. Finally, around season two or three of How I Met Your Mother, pretty much everyone was like, "All right, Jason. You should probably, like, upgrade." So I started looking at houses. And I got sent this listing, and I went and looked at the house—my entire [How I Met Your Mother] cast actually came, and the first thing Neil Patrick Harris said was, "I feel like I just walked into the inside of your brain." It's like a haunted mansion. It's really weird. There's, like, secret passages. Charlie Chaplin used to live there. And I couldn't really afford it. It was right on the precipice of Sarah Marshall getting green-lit, but it hadn't been green-lit yet, and I just took a bet on myself, and I bought the house. And if Sarah Marshall hadn't been made, I would have been screwed.

The Chateau is a total paparazzi trap. I imagine you can't bring girls home without somebody taking your picture.

It's all a little weird. But I've just decided not to buy into all the tabloid stuff and live my life like a normal human being, even though at this point, if I go have lunch with a friend who's a girl, we're dating on the Internet the next day.

You're dating a lot of people on the Internet.

It's the worst. There was one picture on the Internet, and it said "Jason's New Flame?" And it was a picture of me and my sister walking down the street. Somehow, if you put a question mark after it, it's totally legitimate.

Does the fact that you're famous enough to be linked to other famous people make it harder to get into the head of these lovable-loser characters?

I may be successful now, but I'm never gonna be super good-looking. I'm very lucky in that I'm kinda doing leading-man guy now. Which is awesome. But I'm always going to be the underdog in that category. I think Seth and Jonah and I all feel the same way. We're always gonna feel a little bit like the underdog—we're dwelling in this world where we don't really belong.

Do you want to get married? Is that something you look forward to, down the road?

For me it's much more about meeting the right person. I don't have that thing that women have—"I've gotta be married by the time I'm 33, gotta have a kid by the time I'm 35." Let's see where life takes me, y'know? If I met the girl, I'd marry her tomorrow.

Ever been close?

Yeah. I had a couple long relationships. Three years, from like 17 to 20, and then five years from 20 to 25. And when that ended, I thought maybe I should take it easy on the relationship thing. But I'm hoping for the experience that people talk about where it's just a slap across the face, like, "Oh. Done. Yes."

Do you find yourself questioning people's motives when they approach you in public?

There were a couple of girls in that Haunted Hollywood van that I thought could be The One.

"Follow that van!"

No—you know when someone's being regular and when someone's being weird. You find out pretty quick if they're after something. It's pretty thinly veiled. Like, "Oooh—can I sit down and have a drink with you? [beat] So—can you introduce me to Judd Apatow?" [laughs] When I sang that song [onstage] with Maroon 5 and I gave my phone number out, I thought it would be some grand comedy experiment, where I'd save all these voice mails from people propositioning me. And 80 percent of the messages were dudes saying, "Could you give my script to Judd Apatow?"

You basically taught yourself to play music, right?

Yeah. I had two friends in high school who sort of showed me how a piano works. And I just spent two years being terrible at it until I was good at it. That's just me. There's no way I'm actually intrinsically talented at writing, acting, playing music, puppeteering. It's that I'm willing to be shit at them for a while, until I'm good at them. It's like when you watch a kid in math class—at some point, they just shut off, like, "I'm not going to be good at this, ever." I don't ever reach the "Fuck it" point in anything. I'm willing to be bad for as long as it takes, until I'm good.

Where does that willingness to push through come from, you think?

I don't have a sense of shame. I just don't. If I've hurt someone's feelings, if I'm mean to somebody, I'll lament over that for days. I'm that dude. I'll lose sleep over mundane stuff. But I don't really have the thing of, "Oh, I've embarrassed myself." I just don't understand why I would stop trying to play piano even though I'm not good at it. I want to be good at it. So why wouldn't I keep playing?